By Stephanie E. Ponder
RUTH WARINER’S MEMOIR, The
Sound of Gravel, is filled with elements
that make her story relatable. Readers
may identify with being part of a big
family, growing up in poverty, having an
abusive stepfather or losing family
members. However, add growing up in
a polygamist community in Chihuahua,
Mexico, to the other details of Wariner’s
youth, and you get a look into a childhood that seems more fiction than fact.
On the eve of recording the audio
version of The Sound of Gravel, Wariner
tells The Connection, from a hotel room in New
York City, that the idea to write about her childhood
first occurred to her when she was in grad school
and talking to her sisters, who, at that time, were 8,
10 and 12.
She explains, “I kind of decided to write the
story then, just to help them with that void in their
life. They didn’t know their mother, and they didn’t
know the history of their family.”
Wariner’s book covers her life until, when she
was 15, she and her siblings left the colony—with
the help of an older brother and a family friend.
After moving to the U.S., she took on the care of her
three younger sisters and worked while studying for
her GED and then earning a degree to teach high
school Spanish.
Signed book gıveaway
COSTCO HAS 50 signed copies of Ruth Wariner’s
The Sound of Gravel to give away. To enter, go to costco
connectionbookgiveaway.com.
NO PURCHASE, PAYMENT OR OPT-IN OF ANY KIND IS
NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN THIS SWEEPSTAKES.
Purchase will not improve odds of winning. Sweepstakes is
sponsored by Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N Y
10010. Open to legal residents of the U.S. (except Puerto Rico)
who are age 18 or older at the time of entry. One entry per
household. Entries must be received before the February issue
is available online, which will happen around January 26,
2016. Winners will be randomly selected and noti;ed by mail
on or before March 1, 2016. The value of the prize is $27.99.
Void where prohibited. Winners are responsible for all
applicable federal, state and local taxes. Odds of winning
depend on the number of eligible entries received. Employees
of Costco or Macmillan and their families are not eligible.
Pennie Clark Ianniciello,
Costco book buyer
Pennie’s pick
I HAVE BEEN struggling for
days over what I’d say about
this month’s book buyer’s
pick, Ruth Wariner’s memoir,
The Sound of Gravel. In it she
writes about growing up in a
polygamist community in
Mexico, with a few stints
spent in the United States.
She shares what it was
like to be part of a large
extended family, and she
re;ects on how, at an early
age, she knew her beliefs
were not aligned with those
of her parents.
Her childhood was so
different from my own that
it’s dif;cult to imagine such a
life is even possible. But
Wariner proves it was. What
impressed me most was how
she also beautifully and
movingly proves that we are
all more than our circumstances. (Item #1031751, 1/5)
For more book picks,
see page 128.
Busy with classes and her siblings,
Wariner, who lives in Portland, Oregon,
lacked the time to write, so the idea
waited until she finished school and
had a full-time job. From there,
Wariner took “pretty much any kind of
community writing class I could get
into,” to help her get her story out.
In addition to scouring her mem-
ories and using photos as prompts,
“There was so much about the story that I had
to go back and think about and explain again,” she
says, “because so many readers don’t really under-
stand the kind of lifestyle that I grew up in.”
“I tried to include every important character
that had an impact on my life. It was way too many
people to follow. So at that point, I pretty much
decided to just write about my nuclear family—my
mom and my brothers and sisters.”
Around her fourth year of writing, Wariner
started sharing her work with book clubs. She says,
“I was inspired by the way people were just kind of
blown away by this story, and [how they] started to
share their own stories with me. And at that point, I
realized that the book could have a strong impact on
other people.”
There’s no denying the impact the process of
writing had on Wariner. She calls it cathartic, espe-
cially when it came to writing about her mother and
a special-needs sister who died at a very young age.
Through the writing and retelling, Wariner
explains, she found a compassion for her mother
that she didn’t have as a teenager. “I think it was
always there, but I kind of uncovered it and recovered it,” she says. “And there was a part of me that
was mourning the fact that she didn’t have a lot of
confidence. If she really had a lot of self-love and
self-acceptance, she would have never gone for a
religion like that, or gone for a man who treated her
that way.”
Despite having to rehash heartbreaking
elements of her youth, Wariner is glad that
it’s brought her siblings closer together.
And she’s happy for the book’s role in her
own healing: “I really felt like, by the end
of it, I left a lot of my story—the story
that we all have and carry with us—on the
pages. In that regard I [am] thankful that I
went through the process.” C
Ruth Wariner
©
J
AM
ES
R
EY
N
OL
DS
C
OS
T
CO
P
H
OTO
S
T
U
DI
O
/
FR
A
NC
E
FR
EEM
A
N
Family ties
Memoir fuels love and healing
COSTCO PHOTO STUDIO
t
o COSTCO PHOTO STUDIO
In our digital editions
Click here for a video of Ruth Wariner
talking about why she chose to write
The Sound of Gravel. (See page 14
for details.)
